With the _sobranias_ of Chita filled to overflowing every night, with wealthy and poor seeking to be diverted with vodka, dancing and eating all night, and sleeping most of the day, where is it possible to begin aiding them in the forming of a government of their own? If they are willing to allow various self-seeking usurpers of government to set up military establishments and gradually become local princelings waiting for the time that their power can be sold out to some imperial personage who wishes to restore a throne, why should we quarrel with these princelings or about them--the Semenoffs, the Kalmikoffs and others who are of the same stripe? That is what the monarchists mean when they talk about the “proper time,” to restore the monarchy--the time when the local chiefs find it convenient to sell out, and there is a buyer handy who knows how to wear a crown--and swing a saber over the heads of the multitude. Then there will be people in Russia and in that part of the Empire of old known as Siberia, who will rise and assert that the Allies, or the United States, or somebody, betrayed them. They will say that our “watchful waiting,” and our assurances of friendship and our efforts to aid with Red Cross supplies, and our “we don’t know what to do” policy, was merely our waiting for a “proper time” to hand them over to a new Czar. That is why I say the _sobranias_ with their dirty plays, filled with audiences roaring gleefully over indecency, should have been filled nightly with Siberians threshing out the problems which confronted them. No. They were concerned chiefly with consuming the supply of vodka, with the women who sifted through the port of Vladivostok or came up from Harbin, and with cursing discreetly behind their hands the gentlemanly Japanese officer who went to see the fun. I wonder if some of these Japanese, accused by the Siberians of secretly desiring to capture Siberia, did not realize with Japanese astuteness that the Siberians were conquering themselves. There is no necessity for the Japanese fighting with the Siberians for Siberia, when the Siberians seem to be bent upon eliminating themselves. Of course the Siberians are friendly to the United States--remember that the American officer whom I relieved in Chita had been threatened with assassination. This officer was a foreigner, who by faithful service in our old regular army, had acquired a commission in our native forces of the Philippines, known as the Philippine Scouts. I am not sure what his nationality was--a Pole or a Ukranian. I think the chief objection to him was the belief in certain quarters in Chita that he was a Jew.